Rosie is taking a speech communications class at her school, and her next speech, she told us over dinner this week, giggling, is about butterfly reproduction. She doesn’t know how she came up with it. She read us the introductory sentence:

If you’re like me you’ve probably always wondered how butterflies reproduce, if there’s a mating ritual, and how long it takes for the new butterflies to arrive.

I don’t know if she’s thinking about reproduction because of all that we’re going through, all our talks of follicle counts and her photographing some of our nightly needle sessions. She tells her mom of our progress, and her mom calls us excited about our follicle counts. She tells her friends’ moms and they call me congratulating me on all my eggs. Last week I texted her when we got back from our appointment:

me: Doctors visit this morning: they counted 23 eggs!!!!

Rosie: Yay!!u are very fertal!!

After school when I picked her up she hopped in the car and said Hey, fertile lady. She said she squealed to her friends at lunch, My mom has 23 eggs! but they were unimpressed.

Maybe what we’re doing is a form of butterfly reproduction. It seems mysterious enough, ephemeral enough, and intangible. It seems like something that happens in a dream, not in this reality, not without a microscope and wings.

April 10th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment

In high school during a lesson on Native American culture, we made dream catchers and someone came in and did a meditation exercise with us. We all lay on the floor on our backs with our eyes closed and he took us through a forest or some landscape for a long time, and then we were to turn inside our minds and see the animal that we were. I was a deer. I saw five deer last week and they reminded me that I am one. I see a deer in my black dog, too. Something about our posture, way of moving, temperament, skittishness.

April 10th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

In preparation for a spine appointment I have next week, my mother mailed to me all my x-rays from injuries in 1999. Ten years later, there is my body. I know that person. In some of the x-rays, the person doesn’t look like me — no ridge of the nose, no body fat. I couldn’t look for long at the x-rays of my brain: I show the contents of my brain on this page, but the actual substance of the brain is different. Not like the difference between what the artist’s hand made and then looking at the artist’s hand. Brains are too powerful and mysterious to be so sludgy-looking. This x-ray of my silhouette is me, though: that’s my posture, that’s my mouth.

April 10th, 2009 | Category: photograph, written | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading a book that doesn’t require I think too hard so that my 29 eggs can grow. In the memoir, this young woman is raising a coyote, she herself desiring freedom and afraid of intimacy, the coyote caught between the free and domestic realm. She is unreliable as a narrator — it is clear that she, like anyone, could use some good therapy — and this is part of why I love reading the book: it’s exasperating to hear only her perspective. There is no omniscient narrator who is artfully pulling the strings, drawing metaphors that only the reader can understand. We only have her.

I feel that way inside my own head with the hormones. I know that each thought I’m having is valid to consider, but I also know that it’s extreme and therefore skewed. It’s not that Steve just said something hurtful, it’s that everything will hurt me right now. It’s not that that needle hurt extra badly, it’s that everything is tender right now. It is a strange way to be in the world, listening cautiously to my own misfiring brain. That needle did hurt a lot, though, for real. Steve even saw the lady’s hands shake as she stabbed.

April 9th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment

But the thing is, it has everything on it. So often I’ll take it out of my bag and then draw a blank, unsure what exactly I wanted to do with it (hormone brain). I’ll just stare at it, then check my email and put it away again. Then remember: my calendar, I wanted to check my calendar! and take it out again. And yesterday I was in the car and needed to google something, so I typed in the google search and then put the phone to my ear, waiting for it to ring. That’s messed up. This morning I needed to check to see if I had something in my eye so I searched the applications to see if there was a mirror, but there wasn’t–and that made me mad (hormone heart).

April 9th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

They say that couples start to have sex problems after the first year because our hormones are rigged that way: for the first six months we’re supposed to feel so much bliss that we can’t even think straight. After three to six months, that’s when biologically people tend to have children, and then after that our hormones aren’t needed anymore and that fizzy love feeling flattens a bit.

Unless you are only 23 and raising someone’s 9-year-old daughter alongside his ex-wife, and you are planning on four more years of grad school and your boyfriend has had a vasectomy and this is the 21st century, then the hormones get a bit confused.

One of the trickier parts about IVF for me right now is that everything is so planned. Babies are hard; they’re time- and soul-suckers. People make evil laughs at pregnant woman and tell them to kiss their sleep goodbye. It is strange to want this in my core, biologically, in a part I can’t control, to want to give up the life that I know and fill it with baby toys and baby barf and midnight cries. I don’t function well without eight hours of sleep.

And I think that people can fall into pregnancy gracefully and helplessly, here we are, love did this, so be it. It is strange to pay for it, force it, talk to my mother about my follicle count. Because I am terrified that I won’t even want it. How should I know if I will be glad I have a child? Who can know what it will be like when it is territory uncharted?

Same with marriages. I plan on staying married with all of my being. But many couples fall in love, it was love, here we are, look at us pregnant, marriage is imminent, and then fall apart. To make the choice about having a baby so consciously and with all of my wallet, with all the needles and the calendars and drives across town to the doctor, it asks me to know with all of my heart that my marriage will thrive for the rest of our life.

I am not good with spontaneity. I asked myself for 1,000 days if I wanted to marry Steve before I did. This baby is coming in the same fashion, to a mother both terrified and prepared. The ultrasound today showed 23 follicles. There’s no turning back now.

April 8th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment

I am on a mission to get Joon the brown dog to be more affectionate. She started off her puppyhood staring into my eyes with staring contests that I repeatedly lost, but then she got too interested in her big brother and now she’s just obsessed with food. A month ago I decided that I could either feel that I don’t have as strong of a connection to Joon or else I could forge one. The rules have relaxed a little — if she’s allowed on the bed or on a chair beside me — in favor of cuddle time.

It’s really working. Showing love is a learned action. She gets more excited now by humans, by me, and she comes closer just to be touched instead of to see quickly if I have food. She puts her paws out to touch me when she wants me to pet her now. I am over the top: where’s my cuddlemonkey where’s my little cuddlebug! I coo, embarrassing everyone.

But love is learned both ways. And I feel so much more love for her lately because I am invested in her emotions and their connection to mine. With Moby it is easy: he runs over he dives into my laps, touches my face with his paw, gently licks the outside of my ear, rubs his face side to side along my leg. With Joon we have to work harder, but it is there, she is in there.

And because of this, I started wanting to care for her more. I took her to a holistic veterinarian because I could no longer take her flapping her ears or licking her paws. Before, I could tolerate it; it seemed minor. But the more I care for her, the more it hurts my own ears, my hands. The veterinarian gave her a western and chinese analysis, concluded that she has too much heat and wind, and administered chinese herbs. She peed inexplicably twice in the house after a day on the herbs, and then she hasn’t itched or flapped or licked since. She seems proud of herself. Love is sort of everything.

April 8th, 2009 | Category: pet, written | Leave a comment

The system of our book-buying hasn’t been the most locally friendly in the past couple of years: we tend to find books that we want through conversation or reading reviews or however, put the titles on our Amazon wishlist, then do a bulk order when we both have enough that it’s worth the cost of shipping.

But this week we decided that we would rather support the local bookstore that is threatening to go out of business. So two days ago we wrote our Amazon wishlists down on paper, walked into the bookstore when we were downtown, and fell in love with books all over again. There are just so many beautiful books, walking into that store floods me with its beauty and the potential of all I could know. We ended up purchasing many books we didn’t know we wanted.

After looking around a bit, we went to a lady working there and asked her if she had any of the books on our lists. They had none of the books on our list. None. She looked to see if she could order them through their usual book dealer, and most of them they could not order there. So she went on Amazon, we spelled out for her all the names of all the authors of all the books we wanted (could we just show her our wishlists online?), and she hand-wrote special order forms. See, this is so much better than Amazon! Steve said with his humor that is sometimes hard to get (I tend to run around behind him with a broom saying He’s kidding. Sorry. He’s kidding.) She said someone would email us to see if it was indeed possible to get the books that we all saw available on Amazon (just click that big yellow add-to-cart button and the world is yours) but that this bookstore may not be able to order through their special order book dealer. It has been two days and no one has emailed yet.

Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon books were shipped directly to bookstores and we all went there to pick them up? Then we’d walk in and see friends, drink coffee, find new books we didn’t know we needed, read magazines, feel community, put quarters in parking meters that go to support the literary city that I love and that I want to thrive.

April 1st, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

When he does the shot he has to wash his hands and roll up his sleeves, which is when I get to see his forearms. I can feel numb in my heart and all he has to do is roll up his sleeves and I am disarmed. I don’t know why I love this look, but it might go back to Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. Or else it is just about work, raw, ready.

We do the shots at night at the dining room table where the lighting is soft, almost too soft to measure the liquids. Not the green fluorescent light of a facility.

Lying in bed with a pain behind my heart or too exhausted to get out of the dog bed, the dog bed. When everything feels soft. Even the tines of a fork could feel soft against my cheek. The to-do list backwards on my cheek. In bed, the sky gray of not-spring.

Drawing rotten oranges, those irregular eggs, totally infertile with gorgeous mold.

Feeling somehow brave. Looking for poetry.

The way when before he puts the needle in my thigh he says I love you, that soft light again making shadows of his eyes so they are almost black holes, no color, into which I can disappear.

The drawings on my body, tattoos of forced happiness. That contrast of pain and laughter, the angel smiling like schadenfreude at the needles, pretty bruises discoloring the red ink.

March 30th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment